Evernight – Claudia Gray

She’s been uprooted from her small hometown and enrolled at Evernight Academy, an eerie gothic boarding school where the students are somehow too perfect: smart, sleek, and almost predatory. Bianca knows that she doesn’t fit in.

At Evernight Academy nothing is as it seems. The description on the back of the book calls Evernight Academy gothic. I think that’s a little misleading and the writer of the blurb should have told potential readers the truth about Evernight Academy – that it’s not just a school, but is in fact a school for vampires. But Evernight is shaking things up this year and they’ve allowed human enrollments for the first time, too. The humans, of course, are entirely unaware that more than half the school’s population are actually undead Americans. There are strict rules about exposing yourself to a human, though, and vampires are forbidden from biting the human students. But honestly, how cruel is that? Dangling humans under vampire noses is like putting chow in front a dog and telling him that he’s not allowed to have it. How long would poor puppy be able to resist something like that? Not very long, I’d imagine. And it’s the same with the vampires. Put them in living quarters with humans and there are bound to be problems. Problems of the bloodsucking kind.

Meet Bianca – the newest enrollment at Evernight Academy. She’s shy, smart and a bit of a loner. But she gets housed with Patrice, who is more poised and beautiful than anyone Bianca has ever met. She’s so full of confidence that just being in the same room as Patrice makes Bianca feel more than a little uncomfortable. Can an outsider like Bianca and an It Girl like Patrice be friends? Who knows….

Perhaps Lucas knows. Lucas is also a new arrival at Evernight and is instantly drawn to Bianca. And lucky for Bianca because the moment she sees Lucas she knows she’s in love. Life would totally suck if her first true love didn’t return her affections, don’t you think? But there is more to Lucas than meets the eye. He seems well informed about Evernight and its history, and he really, really doesn’t like Patrice and her friends. In fact, he dislikes them so much that he does everything in his power to isolate Bianca and himself away from their prying eyes. Then one night during a hot and heavy make out session, Bianca does something so unbelievably weird and wrong that it changes everything between her and Lucas. This event works as a sort of catalyst for the downward spiral of everything in Bianca’s life, and suddenly Bianca’s world becomes a regular Jerry Springer episode.

I don’t want to give anything crucial away, but I will say this…

– Someone flees Evernight, fearing for their life.

– Someone breaks the Evernight code and bites a human.

– Someone unexpectedly becomes a vampire.

– Someone has an evil, ulterior motive which shakes the foundations of Evernight through history.

– Love is made, trust is lost, hearts are broken and unexpected friendships are formed.
I decided to read Evernight because a lot of people had told me it had a similar Bella and Edward kind of love story happening. I can safely say, with complete and total conviction, that this is not true. For me, Bella and Edward were so real and so alive that I had to remind myself repeatedly that they were fictional and that their connection was fabricated. Not real in any way. Lucas and Bianca’s connection isn’t so intense. Not even half as much, in fact. I felt like Claudia Gray was telling us they had a connection, rather than showing us they did. And just because she was telling me that Lucas loved Bianca and Bianca loved Lucas doesn’t for one second mean that I’m going to believe that. I just wasn’t feeling it with these guys.

Will I read the second novel? Yes, simply because I want to know what happens. Will I loose sleep if I don’t get my hands on it right away? No, I wont.